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blocky, its great stones quarried from the cliff that loomed behind it. Below its walls, the entrances of caves and ancient mines yawned like toothless black mouths. The Hammerhorn’s iron gates had been closed and barred for the night. Aeron beat on them with a rock until the clanging woke a guard.
    The youth who admitted him was the image of Gormond, whose horse he’d taken. “Which one are you?” Aeron demanded.
    â€œGran. My father awaits you within.”
    The hall was dank and drafty, full of shadows. One of Gorold’s daughters offered the priest a horn of ale. Another poked at a sullen fire that was giving off more smoke than heat. Gorold Goodbrother himself was talking quietly with a slim man in fine grey robes, who wore about his neck a chain of many metals that marked him for a maester of the Citadel.
    â€œWhere is Gormond?” Gorold asked when he saw Aeron.
    â€œHe returns afoot. Send your women away, my lord. And the maester as well.” He had no love of maesters. Their ravens were creatures of the Storm God, and he did not trust their healing, not since Urri.
No proper man would choose a life of thralldom, nor forge a chain of servitude to wear about his throat.
    â€œGysella, Gwin, leave us,” Goodbrother said curtly. “You as well, Gran. Maester Murenmure will stay.”
    â€œHe will go,” insisted Aeron.
    â€œThis is my hall, Damphair. It is not for you to say who must go and who remains. The maester stays.”
    The man lives too far from the sea,
Aeron told himself. “Then I shall go,” he told Goodbrother. Dry rushes rustled underneath the cracked soles of his bare black feet as he turned and stalked away. It seemed he had ridden a long way for naught.
    Aeron was almost at the door when the maester cleared his throat, and said, “Euron Crow’s Eye sits the Seastone Chair.”
    The Damphair turned. The hall had suddenly grown colder.
The Crow’s Eye is half a world away. Balon sent him off two years ago, and swore that it would be his life if he returned.
“Tell me,” he said hoarsely.
    â€œHe sailed into Lordsport the day after the king’s death, and claimed the castle and the crown as Balon’s eldest brother,” said Gorold Goodbrother. “Now he sends forth ravens, summoning the captains and the kings from every isle to Pyke, to bend their knees and do him homage as their king.”
    â€œNo.” Aeron Damphair did not weigh his words. “Only a godly man may sit the Seastone Chair. The Crow’s Eye worships naught but his own pride.”
    â€œYou were on Pyke not long ago, and saw the king,” said Goodbrother. “Did Balon say aught to you of the succession?”
    Aye.
They had spoken in the Sea Tower, as the wind howled outside the windows and the waves crashed restlessly below. Balon had shaken his head in despair when he heard what Aeron had to tell him of his last remaining son. “The wolves have made a weakling of him, as I feared,” the king had said. “I pray god that they killed him, so he cannot stand in Asha’s way.” That was Balon’s blindness; he saw himself in his wild, headstrong daughter, and believed she could succeed him. He was wrong in that, and Aeron tried to tell him so. “No woman will ever rule the ironborn, not even a woman such as Asha,” he insisted, but Balon could be deaf to things he did not wish to hear.
    Before the priest could answer Gorold Goodbrother, the maester’s mouth flapped open once again. “By rights the Seastone Chair belongs to Theon, or Asha if the prince is dead. That is the law.”
    â€œGreen land law,” said Aeron with contempt. “What is that to us? We are ironborn, the sons of the sea, chosen of the Drowned God. No woman may rule over us, nor any godless man.”
    â€œAnd Victarion?” asked Gorold Goodbrother. “He has the Iron Fleet. Will Victarion make a claim,